Everyone felt slightly sick, and then, for some reason, angry. Perhaps that was why someone began kicking. The X, with its bagged head, did not seem to notice. It did not flinch. It did not struggle.
“People who’ve had polio,” one girl observed sagely, “can’t feel anything. My dad told me.”
Now there was real curiosity. And further experimentation. Thud, thud, thud. A redness, and then a spreading bluish darkness, became visible on the matchstick leg. It was hard to reach it between the iron bars. The girls had to aim carefully. They became more and more accurate, but there was never a reaction. No cry. It was true, then. The X couldn’t feel a thing!
Time to try something new.
Between the inverted V of leather straps that framed the crotch, hairs grew. A wispy tuft, bedraggled, but the real focus of fascination for many of the girls whose hair “down there” had not yet started. Someone produced a stick. At first, to universal gasps and giggles, the hairs were “combed”. Then the skin behind them was softly poked. Then, in a bold hand, the stick made a swooping dive and rose into the crack between the legs. And now at last the X reacted with a violent spasm and a muffled cry from inside the skirt that covered its face.
A spell was broken.
Some children ran away, others cheered. Flushed triumph for the stick-wielder, who jabbed again and again.
But Felicity went berserk.
Monkey girl! they shrieked as she lashed out with her fists. Wildcat! Reffo! Nevertheless, they fled from her as she jabbered in her monkey talk; and when they had all gone, Felicity led Hester to the one place where they would be left alone — to the circle of shadows and ghosts beneath the kind branches of the Moreton Bay fig. They sat in the dirt with their backs against the trunk. Felicity sat with her legs crossed, and so did Hester, after a fashion, except that the leg in the cage stuck awkwardly out in front of her.
“Can’t you feel anything on your leg?” Felicity asked with awe. “You really can’t?”
Hester’s face had a blank look. She might have been asleep with her eyes open. Her breath came noisily and quickly in and out, in and out, with the sound of a man sawing wood. But apart from this she seemed very calm, as though nothing had happened.
“It used to hurt,” she said at last. “But I learned a trick.”
“What trick?”
“As soon as they start, I pretend my leg is made of wood.”
“But …” Felicity paused delicately. “You felt the stick part?”
Hester didn’t answer. She reached in under her skirt and touched herself. When she pulled out her hand, there was blood on it. They both stared at it with a thrill of horror. A fearful and magic sign.
“I’m going to tell,” Felicity said. “I know who did that, with the stick. I’m telling.”
“No!” Hester grabbed her arm and dug her fingernails in. “Promise me you won’t tell. They just do it worse the next time if you tell.”
“If anyone does it again …” Felicity vowed, her fists doubled up.
“I just have to practise, that’s all,” Hester said. “I have to practise pretending that part is made of wood too.”
Weeks passed.
Felicity and Hester always went to the lavs together. Felicity stood at the swing door with her fists in full view. No one bothered them. They spent their lunch hours under the Moreton Bay fig. They made up stories about the trenches. They talked to the boy who had drowned in the mud. Sometimes he brought the woman in the lacy, old-fashioned dress. She would be holding his hand but she would never turn round. Please, they would beg. But she never would.
Sometime in November, when the jacarandas were in bloom and the grass was turning brown from the heat and the days were drowsy with the sweet smell of frangipani, an inspector from the Department of Education came to the school, and Miss Richards received a message to send Felicity to the Grade Eight classroom again.
“You can give her anything at all,” Mr Barlow told the inspector. “Anything at all.”
The inspector picked up a Reader from one of the front desks and flipped through it. He made a decision and ran the pad of his thumb down the centre crease. Those two pages, Felicity could see, would not dare move again until he gave permission.
“So you’re Evelyn’s child,” he said. “Do you remember your mother?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, young lady, let’s see if you can hold a candle to her. Let’s see what you make of the chariot race.”
It was about a man called Ben Hur, and his lifelong enemy Messala. Just as she was getting to the thrilling part, just as she was dying to find out who would win the race, the inspector said, “Stop!”
Like a Roman consul, he took the Reader from her and put it back on the desk it had come from.
“All right, Johnson,” he said. “Carry on from there, will you?”
Johnson was much too big for his desk. He was nearly sixteen, another “slow” student who had been “kept back”, and his voice, when it came out, seemed much too big for its body. Perhaps on that account it had trouble finding its way. It stumbled. It doubled back on itself. It got lost between lines.
“Enough!” groaned the inspector. He covered his ears with his hands. The class giggled nervously.
“Next boy!” he said. “Continue!”
But this was not much better. The whole front row, all boys who had been “kept back”, one after another, tripped and fumbled through the next few paragraphs at a snail’s pace. As each boy was released from his forced labour, he glared at Felicity over the edge of his book.
I don’t want to do this, her eyes pleaded back. Mr Barlow makes me. She did not in the least blame them for hating her. Her hands were coiled into fists at her side and her fingernails cut into her own palms. She wondered what would happen if she were suddenly to hammer the inspector.
“Stop!” he cried for the sixth time.
He handed the Reader back to Felicity.
“Now, young lady. Show these gentlemen how it should be done.”
“Please, sir,” she said. “I don’t want to.”
The inspector raised an eyebrow in astonishment. “Well,” he said dryly. “I’m afraid that’s beside the point. Little girls have to do as they are told. You can start at the top of the page.”
Felicity stood there trembling. She was afraid not to begin, but she could not, simply could not, read on.
Mr Barlow, the headmaster, stepped in. (Everyone knew Felicity was Mr Barlow’s pet.)
“You see what you’ve done?” he accused the front row. “There, there,” he said to Felicity. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Run along back to your room now.”
Felicity’s feet felt heavier than a box full of Grade Eight Readers. The floor might have been covered with red clay mud, it was so difficult to lift one foot after the other.
“I’m going to build a boat,” she told Hester that afternoon. They always stayed late after school, peaceful beneath their tree. It was not really safe for Hester to walk home until most of the children had gone. “I’m going to sail back to India. My ayah misses me. And when I tell my father what they do at this school, he won’t make me leave again.”
“But your father’s dead,” Hester objected.
“No, he’s not. Not really. That’s just what everyone thinks. But he stays out in the boats with the fisher people. Anyway, my ayah is there. And you can come with me if you like.”
They drew boat-building plans in the dirt with a stick. There were problems to be worked out: how to make the boat watertight, where to store enough food. Perhaps they stayed later than usual. It was so quiet; quiet in the heavy, still way that promises an evening thunderstorm.
But it was not a downpour that trapped them.
Hester saw the boys first, and Felicity saw Hester’s eyes go blank and her body stiffen like wood. She turned. The whole front row from Grade Eight was there, standing at the edge of the shadow like black crows watching for the soft parts. She could have run, of
course, or climbed the tree. She was as fast as any of them. But she couldn’t leave Hester.
It was like a dream, everything in slow motion. But when Johnson clamped a hand over her mouth, she woke up and kicked and struggled and fought. This delighted the boys. There were four of them holding her, laughing. One of them pulled off her underwear, but then they held her like a trussed chicken.
“First,” Johnson told her, “you gotta watch what we do to Little Miss Ironpants. Just so you know what’s coming.”
“’Cause you gonna get something even bigger and better, Little Miss Smartypants,” someone else promised.
If they had not clamped a hand over her mouth, Felicity would have been much too proud to scream. Now it was a challenge. Not for a minute did she stop kicking and biting — until someone twisted her arms up behind her back. It did not seem wise to provoke further pain at this point, and she pretended to give up.
Hester lay very still. She did not make a sound. In fact, once they had ripped off her panties and pulled up her dress, they didn’t even need to hold her. Then Johnson took off his pants and Felicity saw with shocked fascination that his thing was about six times as big as it should have been. All the boys, except the two now holding Felicity, took off their pants. They all had things as big as five-shilling firecrackers, sticking straight up and out like skyrockets waiting to be lit. She couldn’t understand it. She had seen boys peeing behind bushes with their little pink dicks. Nothing like this. Perhaps it came from being kept back.
She bit the hand clamped over her mouth and kicked again like a mad thing. This brought a stunning blow to her head, and then, after she had fallen, a fist like a sledgehammer punched her in the soft place between her legs. She could feel the pain everywhere, even in the tips of her fingers and at the ends of her hair. She began to be afraid, and the fear gobbled up her anger and her energy and something else she couldn’t define. She wanted to die very quickly.
“Make her watch!” Johnson yelled. “Barlow’s bloody little pet. Make her watch!”
One of her captors sat on her legs, and the other, who had his hand over her mouth, forced her head sideways to make her see. But she defied them, she closed her eyes, she couldn’t watch.
The boys were breathing hard, like race horses, and making snorting and whinnying sounds. Then there was a cheer. “Attaboy, Johnson! Kaboom.” Laughter. More scuffling. Grunts.
I am made of wood, Felicity said to herself. (She could hear her own voice like a scream inside her head.) I am made of wood, I am made of wood. But it didn’t work. Nothing dimmed the siren of pain that jangled on and on and on: the weight on her legs, the hand on her mouth, the throbbing bruise at her head and groin. But all this was nothing compared to the fear. The fear was like a great shark-toothed mouth that was chewing her up, mincing her, turning her into liquid.
“Oh Christ!” yelped the boy who sat on her legs. “What the hell …? You filthy little slut!”
For a moment her mouth was free, and she screamed full force.
“Christ!” someone said. Something soft — her own underwear — was rammed between her teeth. She gagged and vomited and swallowed her vomit and gagged again. General disturbance. “Christ,” she heard Johnson say. “You dumb bugger, Adams, you’ve made Ironpants bloody as hell.”
“Push them into the trenches,” someone said. “It’ll look like they fell, and they’ll get hell for being there.”
She remembered the fall and the impact of Hester’s body against hers. Then nothing.
When she opened her eyes and sat up, bells banged in her ears. There was a frightful smell. She became aware of several things at once: that Hester was staring at her with blank eyes, that they were in the bottom of the trench, that her own legs were wet and sticky, and then — with a sharp spasm of disgust — that she was streaked with her own shit.
Hester reached over and took her hand. She was smiling. “It worked!” she said. “I can make that part wooden too. I didn’t feel a thing.”
Felicity opened her mouth to say, “I’ll kill them,” but sobbing sounds came out instead. She couldn’t stop them. They went on and on.
“You just have to practise,” Hester comforted. “Soon you’ll be as good as me. I didn’t feel anything. Truly.”
A tiger had Felicity in its paws and wouldn’t let her go. It shook her and rattled her as though she were nothing but a handful of birdbones. It made her dribble a vile-tasting greenish fluid. “The teachers,” she blubbered. “The teachers …”
But Hester said: “You must never tell anyone. Never. If you tell, they just do it worse the next time.”
On the day Felicity found me in the woods, the day I was running away for good, I wanted to know if they ever told.
“No.” she said. “We never did. You’re the first person to know about it, Jean-Marc.”
Fifteen years later, on the day Felicity called from Boston and told my answering machine that a man named Hunter was trailing her, I thought of Hester, and so — I am sure — did she. I play that tape over and over, listening to the break in her voice. Oh Jean-Marc, I’m so frightened. I rewind, I replay, I strain to catch the message beneath the words.
I make discoveries as I write; I wonder why I did not think of this when I began: that meeting (or vision or misapprehension or whatever it was) at the border, that moment when Felicity first saw La Magdalena, she must have thought of Hester. She was defending Hester again. When her car ran off the road, it wasn’t the cow and the crows she was thinking of, it was Hester.
Though how do I know what she thought?
Her stories bombard me, they seem to have become my own memories, they writhe and change and regroup in the way true memories do. They are like the photographs in her grandfather’s dresser, a deluge of the ever-present past.
About one thing, though, she was wrong.
The fear of physical harm is not worse than the fear of being alone. I cannot believe it is. I cannot believe anything is worse than this. At four o’clock, when Kathleen had not arrived, I called her aunt’s place.
“I’m not allowed to visit you today,” Kathleen said. “I’m sorry, Jean-Marc.”
So I stayed home alone and played some Chopin. Felicity used to sit in the room and read while I practiced Chopin. I was playing a mazurka to cheer myself up but all of a sudden — I don’t know what it was — the notes made a gap in the air. A void. And a thought jumped out at me: What if I never see her again?
Vertigo.
But of course she always breezes back.
When she calls from a kink in the equator or wherever, I’ll be very nonchalant. I’ve had the weirdest dream about you, I’ll say.
Oh dreams! she’ll laugh.
And I’ll laugh too, and this attack of angst will vanish. I know what brought it on. It’s playing that tape, the break in her voice, the catch of panic, it’s putting it down on paper. But probably, when I think about it soberly, Hester couldn’t have been further from her thoughts. For all I know, Hester was a story she made up to distract me when I was ten years old. Perhaps I should delete it. After all, this whole enterprise is for Felicity’s entertainment when she reappears.
And also for Kathleen.
I’m really doing this for Kathleen, who needs to believe that her father will show up. And perhaps he will, who knows? I’ve been running along in a black mood, but it’s impossible to be morbid about Gus, whom I’ve left heading east on the 401.
19
From the turnoff outside Montreal, the road dropped gradually toward L’Ascension. Gus was surprised. He did not remember so many twists and turns. At times he seemed to be driving in large, looping circles. Had he not passed that same farmhouse five miles ago? But of course they all looked much the same.
When he got to L’Ascension, he would have to call Therese. Obviously he could not get back to Winston by nightfall. But what would he say? I realized, once I had crossed the Quebec border, what I was doing but by then … I don’t know what got into me, I fo
und myself outside Montreal so I thought I might as well …
He could hardly say: This is a matter of life and death; and yet he believed it might be.
What exactly did he think he was doing? How could he make sense of it, even to himself? Either La Magdalena would have been absorbed by some refugee network in Montreal, or she would still be in hiding near the cottage. If she were still in hiding — exhausted and desperate — was it likely that she would reveal herself to a man who had consented to turning her in?
All he knew was that he was under some sort of compulsion. That he could not do otherwise. That he felt summoned.
He found that when he tried to picture La Magdalena, he could not evoke her face with any clarity of detail. He could see a luminous circle (like the haloed face of an icon) and the brilliant black eyes. A moon with craters. The more he tried to focus on the pale glow, the less clear the outlines became. Everything was swallowed up in a kind of aura, as though he had looked into the sun.
What am I doing? he asked himself in a sudden panic. Where am I going?
He seemed to be in the middle of a dark wood. He must have strayed from the highway onto a side road that was becoming narrower by the minute, a country lane. Pines swarmed on either side, their branches almost touching overhead in a dark ceiling. When had the pavement ended? He was aware of deep, bone-jolting ruts and of occasional welts of granite outcrop that strafed the underside of the Chevy. Sometimes a not-quite-levelled tree stump jabbed ominously at the muffler.
Had he somehow got on to a hiking trail? He wondered how far back he had taken a wrong turn, and where he would find enough space to turn around. The track dwindled into nothing, snaking away under a quilt of pine needles. Gus reversed, watching for a gap between trees. In the leeside of a massive white pine, he thought, there might just be room to manoeuvre if he pulled sharply left … And then the back wheels locked themselves into a ditch.
He felt curiously resigned about this. More than resigned. He had a strong sense that the impasse was entirely fitting, that what he really wanted to do was walk into that trackless twilight under the pines. He did not bother to lock the car or even to wind up the windows.
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